Disaster Organising for Autonomous Worker Climate Action

Cover: Our comrades from FAU have been busy for quite some time organising workers in the “green industry” (agriculture, horticulture, landscaping, gardening, forest management, environment and the like) in the Green Trades Initiative (IGG, more info in the following link, in German: https://gruene-gewerke.fau.org/). The IGG advocates for the improvement of working and living conditions in these areas, fight for occupational safety and health, aim to stand up for one another, and work together to address the concerns, demands, and struggles of every individual. via https://www.iclcit.org/organising-green-workers/

Cf. https://classautonomy.info/disaster-syndicalism

Godfrey Moase || Disaster organising as a cycle of class-based climate action is not a replacement, or a substitute, for comprehensive climate strategy. Disaster organising may not be a policy platform but what it does is introduce workers as collective agents of change with respect to global warming. This is a necessary ingredient that has been otherwise lacking as the climate crisis has coincided with a period of worker fragmentatio

Capital is incapable of systematically resolving its own crises. What is required is sufficient social power to force a resolution. The neoliberal reaction has delayed this outcome at perhaps the most precarious point of global civilisation.

So while it is workers and other vulnerable people who suffer first, the bell will toll for the billionaires too. It is the peculiar fantasy of the billionaires and the ultra-wealthy that they will somehow be able to insulate themselves from the climate crisis separate from the overall health of the society that they themselves depend on. It is not a new fantasy. The ancient Roman elite retreated to their luxurious country estates imagining that they could see out the chaos around them.

Adam Mckay’s Don’t Look Up has a mid-credits scene that vividly skewers this fantasy of billionaire escape where the naked emperors of Earth are ravaged by the fauna of a new planet. Just as salvation will not be found in the stars, so too does Tim Winton’s Juice portray the madness of finding security in bunkers as the protagonist mercilessly hunts down the scions of fossil fuel capital centuries into the future.

The elite cannot not save themselves, let alone the people as a whole. Liberation organises itself from the bottom up. Workers in motion using a disaster organising framework forces capital to start internalising the cost of its own crisis. Worker resistance can increase costs of production through forcing the atomised social suffering to be counted in the language of profit. It also works at the level of actual or perceived loss of control over some segments of the working-class.

Only the working-class can tip the social scales towards radical climate action, and it is this dynamic that could set up a productive coalition between unions and some climate action groups such as School Strike 4 Climate, Friends of the Earth, and the Tomorrow Movement. One of the reasons that SS4C shook the world was not merely the moral example of school children taking strike action to shame adults into action but for what their action promised for the future – their actions were the promise of a future rupture where workers themselves are striking for a safe climate. This is also a contributing reason why school strikers have lost momentum – such a promise has failed to materialise as the strikers enter the workforce.

It is, of course, not the fault of the school strikers themselves. There was no class-based climate organising program for them to join, and in an environment where even long-term ardent unionists have lost confidence in the capacity of workers to autonomously build and exercise power at work such an impasse was almost inevitable.

Disaster organising as universal experience

While disaster organising is effective on its own terms, it is more powerful as a thread weaved into the overall solidarity wedge. Solidarity bargaining and disaster organising are separately universally relevant to the class as a whole but how this universality combines also merits discussion.

Universal in this context refers to how each cycle of action is relevant to the lived experience of every member of the working-class. Universality should not be conflated with totality. Both the modernist and post-modernist Left made this mistake with differing consequences.

The early to mid-twentieth century modernist Left embraced a universal tendency but at times took it to such an extent that it created totalising narratives and social systems. The post-modernist Left, in recoiling at the failures of these totalising efforts rejected the universal. This degraded relations of solidarity between workers, and facilitated the atomised suffering of the neoliberal reaction. What the solidarity wedge class strategy attempts to achieve is the re-embrace of the universal while rejecting the suffocating tendency of the total. This rejection of totalising tendencies is both a rejection of the Stalinist statist model and neoliberal managerialism.

The labour movement strategies I outline, therefore, should not be read as a total program of activity. This holds both for questions of gender, sexuality, race and other human attributes (which are central to the actual lived class experience), and also to experiences of workplace organising and claims. In short, the way in which I use universal is that it seeks to touch upon part of each worker’s experience without claiming that the entirety of that worker’s experience is structured by or reducible to the issues I have outlined above.

In grounding collective organising and struggle on safety and a living wage for all, the experiences of dependent contractors, casuals, apprentices, labour hire workers and workers in other forms of insecure work arrangements can be incorporated into the central industrial work of the union movement without the worker’s entire agency and existence being marked by the category “insecure”.

Moreover, the universality of this combined approach means that workplace struggle is not reducible to a particular interest, segment or stakeholder group. Instead, disaster organising working in conjunction with solidarity bargaining goes to the very question and character of the society we live in — one where everyone gets to live with dignity. This, therefore, can attract retired workers, unemployed workers, student workers, workers-in-training and injured workers into a common terrain of struggle. Such an orientation, therefore, allows the union movement to adopt a universal outlook as a means through which to grow membership and rebuild density. Young workers, concerned with how they will make a living, grappling with insecure work, and existentially concerned with how global warming will further disrupt their lives will find a movement they can call home.

Together, disaster organising and solidarity bargaining forms a coherent proposition for the fragmented and isolated working class as it actually exists – the right to live a healthy life free from economic and climate insecurity. Such a proposition does not seek to speak for workers but allows them to act as agents of history. It is workers who can shape the world again for the benefit of people.